


genius pediludii

by raumdeuter



Series: team spirit [1]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rivers of London Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3509786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/pseuds/raumdeuter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course Philipp doesn’t figure out there’s a wizard on the squad right off the bat, because Miro is more careful than that.</p><p>Then he finds out there’s more than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	genius pediludii

Of course Philipp doesn’t figure out there’s a wizard on the squad right off the bat, because Miro is more careful than that.

He doesn’t figure it out on the pitch, either, because this is Miroslav “would-admit-to-a-handball-even-if-Germany-were-four-down-at-halftime” Klose he’s dealing with, and to Miro the very idea of using magic during a match is probably unthinkably repulsive. Even if it were for a good cause, like, say, winning an international football tournament in one’s own country.

Philipp still thinks about that, sometimes: if he’d found out earlier, if he’d known, what would have changed? Would he have pressured Miro into a spell or two, for the good of the team? Would he have told Klinsi about it? If it’d been him who’d been the wizard, and not Miro, would he have tried to even the odds, just a little?

Usually he shuts the questions down before they spiral out of control. He’s always been the sort to keep a cautious eye on the past—there is, after all, no better way to learn than from other people’s mistakes—but even he can tell this is a line of thinking that will lead absolutely nowhere.

Anyway, it happens like this: It’s 2006. They’re in Stuttgart for the third place match. The hotel they’ve been put up in has shared bathrooms, with a door on each end that leads to a suite. Philipp only discovers this setup well past midnight when he stumbles out of bed to take a piss and sees a faint light emanating from underneath the other door, blinking on and off at regular intervals.

For a moment he’s tempted to make some comment: _go to bed, Miro, don’t you know we’re playing Portugal tomorrow?_ But some unknown instinct keeps his mouth shut. Instead he places a careful hand on the doorknob, turning it slowly and pulling back inch by painstaking inch, hardly daring to breathe. What he sees takes the remainder of his breath away.

Miro is awake, sitting crosslegged on his bed, the sheets undisturbed. As Philipp watches, he opens his hand, looking curiously intent, and a perfect orb of light appears above it, not quite touching his outstretched palm. It’s about the size of a golf ball, a soothing pale blue color—not so bright it hurts to look at. It’s the most incredible thing Philipp’s ever seen in his life.

Which is when, predictably, the hinges squeak, Miro starts, and the room is plunged back into total darkness.

“They call it hedge magic,” says Miro, after Philipp has turned the light on—the mundane one this time—and sworn on pretty much everything Miro can think of that he won’t breathe a word to anyone. “It’s, ehm, not technically authorized. Actually I’m not supposed to be practicing it at all, and if the KDA find out…” He trails off, looking a little more panicked than usual, though to be fair it’s difficult to tell with Miro.

Philipp has no idea who ‘they’ are or what the KDA might be; he finds he doesn’t care, although he will later, when the mantle of leadership has descended on his shoulders and the burden of illicit wizardry becomes increasingly difficult to conceal. For now his better judgment is entirely clouded by the image of Miro conjuring light out of nowhere, mild features made milder in the gentle glow.

“Can you teach me?” he asks, and he thinks he sees the corner of Miro’s mouth quirk hesitantly upward in response.

 

\---

 

As a general rule, he’s found it’s best to remain levelheaded about his own achievements. But then again, so is his teacher, so when Miro tells him he’s picking up the art at a truly impressive rate, Philipp takes him at his word.

It’s tricky, of course. As Philipp understands it, the bulk of German magical knowledge was lost in the war, and not especially sought after for easily understandable reasons. By Miro’s reckoning most practitioners these days are unlicensed, drawing upon older, less standardized, and considerably more ethical traditions; he learned most of what he knows from his mother, and slowly taught himself the rest, piecing together what he could from books he’d found. The result is an oddly hodgepodge collection of knowledge, half-hedge and half-Newtonian, which is surprising for someone as put-together as Miro usually is.

But Philipp learns. He learns how to make werelights; to chain together spells; to sense the magical residue known as _vestigia_ ; to identify a _signare_ , the calling card that is left after another wizard has passed by. It is careful, precise work, nothing like the wild spellcasting he had initially imagined. Someone else might have found the hours of practice and research tedious. He finds it soothing.

Miro transfers to Bayern a couple months later, and that makes things easier. He and Philipp are both very much creatures of habit, almost stereotypically reassured by structure and protocol, and the days fall into a comforting routine: football in the mornings, and then out into the city proper for magic in the afternoons. In some ways it’s like discovering Munich again for the first time. He’s always been observant, but now he finds he’s noticing things he wouldn’t have even thought to look for. There are dryads in the Bayerischer Wald; there are _Nixen_ in the Isar; and there are rumors of elves living out by Ostbahnhof, except that’s never really been his scene so he doesn’t actually bother to check.

Miro says there are gods and goddesses in the city, too: spirits formed from the collective consciousnesses of rivers and forests, wielding with one hand the kind of easy power it will take Philipp a lifetime to learn. Not that he’s in any hurry; he’s as patient as he is thorough, and more interested in the applications of his newfound discipline to football than he is in attaining untold riches or fame.

For a time he amuses himself by trying to figure out who else on the team, if anyone, might be a wizard, and at first he wonders if the new kid from the reserve squad might be one, too. But he dismisses the notion after watching him gangle his way through a few practice sessions. Thomas Müller is probably the least magical person alive.

 

\---

 

When Philipp exits the locker room in Bloemfontein he finds Michael Ballack waiting for him, arms folded.

“Did you think nobody would notice?” he says.

“What?” says Philipp. Behind him, the door swings shut, muffling but not entirely silencing the raucous celebration going on inside. A little premature, he thinks—but 4-1 against England is nothing to be sneezed at, either.

“I mean, I had my suspicions before, but for you to go and show off to everyone like that—” Ballack cuts himself off abruptly, clenching his jaw.

At first Philipp thinks it must have been something he said at the last press conference, but for once he finds that unlikely. This isn’t the fury of a captain scorned, but a different sort of anger, colder, more intense. It’s rare for someone like Ballack, who’s always worn his heart on his sleeve, and Philipp finds himself resisting the urge to take a step backwards.

“Show what off, exactly?” Philipp says, and a muscle in Ballack’s cheek twitches.

He glances once, sharply, to either side, but the hallway is mostly deserted. The shouting and clicking cameras of the mixed zone have been drowned out by the rest of the team, who are pouring their hearts and souls into an impromptu and very badly sung rendition of “Schland O Schland.” Nevertheless he seizes Philipp abruptly by the arm and pulls him further down the hallway, until even the singing has mostly faded away.

“Lampard’s goal,” hisses Ballack. “Just now. How fucking stupid do you have to be to think you can pull that kind of thing off on the world stage?”

“Lampard’s—” begins Philipp, about to do another impression of a broken record. But something about Ballack’s expression tips him off, and he falls silent, an icy trickle of realization slowly beginning to work its way down his spine.

He was right. This isn’t about the armband at all.

This time it’s Philipp’s turn to glance over his shoulder, uncomfortably aware of how suspicious they look. Current captain and ex-captain standing off to the side, having a whispered argument? He can practically see the headlines now.

“You’re saying,” he says, as quietly as he can, “that the disallowed goal was because of—other causes.” He can’t bring himself to say _magic_ ; the word sticks in his throat in a way it hasn’t in years. Maybe because he’d be saying it to Michael Ballack of all people.

“You know it was,” says Ballack, exasperated, “you’re the one who put a glamour on the fucking ref.”

Philipp stares at him for a moment before the words sink in properly, and even then he’s not certain he can believe what he’s hearing. He almost laughs, but Ballack’s expression is still stuck in that half-scowl, and Philipp’s good at reading faces. He knows serious when he sees it.

“I was miles away from the ref when it happened,” he says. “I’m flattered you think I’m that good, but if it was—magic—that did it, it sure as hell wasn’t me.”

“Don’t play stupid, Lahm,” growls Ballack. “In the morning the KDA is going to be all over this stadium, and if they find even a hair out of order all of you are going home early for reasons nobody’s going to be able to explain. Is that what you want?”

The KDA, thinks Philipp. Always with the KDA. Who’d have thought Ballack would be close enough to them to know?

“Look,” Ballack is saying, “I don’t give a fuck if you’re an unlicensed practitioner, okay? I know you’re not the only one because Miro Klose came up to me and told me he was a wizard the day I became captain, and I didn’t rat him out because it’d be a shitty thing to betray his trust. But you and I both know it’d never be him, so where does that leave us?”

 _With a third wizard on the team_ , Philipp doesn’t say, but he can tell Ballack’s reached the same conclusion he has from the way his eyes widen.

“Find him,” says Ballack. He stands back. “Hide the evidence. You’ve got ten hours.”

“Why are you telling me this?” says Philipp suddenly, and Ballack lets out a sound that’s half laugh, half snort.

“This is still my team, you idiot,” he says, and there’s no belligerence left in his voice, only quiet exasperation. “I’m damned if you lot are getting kicked out of the tournament on my watch.”

Philipp watches him go. In the distance, the rest of the team have finished butchering Uwu Lena and are moving on to Xavier Naidoo. There’s an odd feeling in his chest, like a fist has suddenly closed around it, and it has nothing to do with the KDA agents no doubt already in the air by now.

 “What was that all about?” demands a voice too close to his ear, and Philipp starts as one of Thomas’s lanky arms flops companionably around his shoulders. “Was that Micha, huh? Was he giving you shit again?”

“No,” says Philipp, absently. “I—Miro forgot something on the pitch. I’ll be right back.”

“Be quick about it, okay, Fips?” says Thomas. In his other arm he’s cradling a Jabulani—probably one from the match, definitely stolen as a souvenir—and as Philipp turns to shout for Miro he thinks he feels something: a trace of something faint, almost but not entirely like hazelnuts.

He stops and stares at Thomas. Again there’s that stray thought— _what if—_ but then the moment’s gone and there’s still nothing like _vestigia_ on Thomas, only sweat and beer and exuberance, and anyway there’s no time for that, he has to get back on the pitch. Philipp makes his excuses, grabs a confused Miro by the arm, and runs.

Miro, thank god, doesn’t ask questions. He takes one half of the pitch and Philipp takes the other, and they switch when they meet at the center line. Philipp doesn’t expect to sense Miro’s _signare_ (warm spring, the thrill of a landed fish, a restless sea), but he looks anyway, to no avail.  There’s no _vestigia_ on the goal line. There’s none on the posts, either, where he thought there might be. But that tells him nothing; neither grass nor aluminum are the right kind of material to hold magic for very long.

Their only reassurance is the fact that if they can’t sense anything, neither will anyone else. Which is a terribly arrogant thing to think, considering he’s only had, what, four years’ worth of training, and it’s not like Miro’s an expert either, but it’s all they have.

They needn’t have worried. In the end the KDA comb the pitch for five hours and interrogate the ref for an additional three and come up disappointingly empty-handed. They’re cleared to play the match against Argentina, and the one against Spain, for all the good that does.

It takes Philipp six weeks to realize the smell of Nutella is, in fact, Manuel Neuer’s _signare_.

 

\---

 

Time passes. Miro transfers out of Bayern, with a promise to take the train up from Rome every once in a while. Manu transfers in, and Philipp shows no sign of letting on that he knows about Bloemfontein. Ballack makes no attempt to contact Philipp again. Things are quiet, if only just. At any moment Philipp feels as if the uneasy equilibrium might tip, and for once he finds he has nothing even remotely resembling a contingency plan.

But nothing happens. He almost wishes something would, just to shake things up a little. He definitely wishes it would on a sunny day in May, two years after the World Cup, when Allianz Arena crumbles into silence around them and it’s all he can do to hold his team up and his head high. Manu carefully avoids his gaze, and Philipp gets the feeling he might have tried something again, only it didn’t work.

In the morning they all wake to a text from Thomas: _yeah so this sucks balls but you know what we’re going to get through it. don’t you dare forget this feeling, because next year we’re going to win this thing. next year we’re going to win all the fucking things._

They don’t forget. They can’t. But life goes on.

Months pass. The Champions League comes round again, and before Philipp knows it he’s in the car park of Emirates Stadium with the rest of the team after a solid win away. They’re about to pile into the bus to celebrate back at the hotel when a policeman approaches them. He’s not smiling, although to be fair that could be because they’ve just beaten Arsenal 3-1.

“What did you do now, Franck,” says Jérôme, and David laughs a little nervously. Philipp, for his part, pastes on his helpful captain smile and moves forward to intercept.

But the policeman doesn’t even look at him. Doesn’t look at Franck, although given previous experience he probably should have. Instead he marches right up to Thomas, who against all reason has completely failed to notice the police presence and is busy informing a bemused and long-suffering Javi of his intentions to purchase some prizewinning racehorse or another for Lisa.

“Excuse me,” says the policeman in English, and Thomas spins to face him. “PC Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police. Can I have a word?”

Only someone who has known Thomas for years could catch it. Surprise flickers across his face, and his nose twitches once, as if he’s caught an interesting scent. Then it’s wiped abruptly clean, replaced by an expression of pleased interest.

“Yes, of course,” he says, “but only one word, we are in a bit of a hurry.”

“Ha,” says PC Grant. “Funny.” But Thomas is already headed towards the other side of the bus, gesturing for him to follow, and after a moment’s hesitation PC Grant does.

Philipp feels it then, although what _it_ is, exactly, is anyone’s guess. It’s not as if he can sense anything like _vestigia_ in the air, only sweat and beer. But for some reason it’s suddenly very important than he get on the bus and forget about everything he’s seen in the last minute. He knows himself enough to recognize the emotions aren’t his own; even so, he’s halfway up the bus steps before he can think to tear himself away.

It takes more effort than he expects to get back off the bus, and when he does he finds himself swimming against the tide as the rest of the team tries to get on. By all rights Jérôme, David, and Franck should be following Thomas’s and PC Grant’s every move with rapt attention, but they seem to have lost interest almost immediately. Only Manu blinks once and shakes his head, as if awakening from a daydream, before catching Philipp’s eye.

It’s a spell, he knows it is, but he’s never encountered anything like it before. “Philipp—” begins Manu, frowning, but Philipp gestures for him to get on the bus and some of the residual suggestion must still be lingering, because Manu’s frown clears a little and he takes one slow step forward, then another.

Philipp doesn’t wait to see if he actually goes. He ducks around the back of the bus, holds his breath, and listens as hard as he can. Miro’s taught him a spell for listening in to people—something about amplifying select soundwaves—but right now using any magic at all seems unwise, and not only because it’d blow out all the phones in the immediate vicinity.

(So why didn’t that persuasion spell blow out his phone?)

“ _Seducere_ ,” PC Grant is saying in a low voice, and Philipp starts at the familiar Latin: he’s a wizard, too. “That’s a trick I didn’t expect to see in a football stadium.”

“Are you very sure you don’t want to apologize for wasting my time and go away and have a nice warm beer?” There’s Thomas, sounding cheerfully reasonable: Philipp finds himself nodding along before he realizes what he’s doing. “Don’t tell me there is a rule against it. Your _arrangements_ wouldn’t allow for something so specific.”

“Actually they do,” says Grant. “I had a look in the Folly’s library and would you believe it, an obscure subsection in a Football League handbook from 1934 clearly prohibits the use of all magic, Newtonian or otherwise, before, during, and after a match. Not that it would hold up in a court of law, of course, but I figure having a wizard on a football team is cheating any way you slice it.”

(But Thomas can’t be a wizard, thinks Philipp. He would have noticed.)

 “What are you going to do, report me to the KDA?” says Thomas. He sounds like he’s smiling.

“Yes, actually,” says PC Grant.

There’s a pause—just long enough, Philipp figures, for Grant to think he’s called Thomas’s bluff—before Thomas starts to laugh.

“Okay,” he says, “then do it. But you will only be wasting more of your time—typical British bureaucracy, hey? I can tell you the KDA knows about me already.”

Grant snorts. “Pull the other one, mate, it’s got bells on. The KDA permitting a licensed practitioner to play on a professional football team? On a _national_ football team?”

“Yes, if you like to put it that way.” Thomas must still be smiling; he sounds as if he’s laying down a trump card at the Schafkopf table. “The same way your Cecilia Tyburn Thames is, how do you say it, permitted to involve herself in politics.”

Silence: long, stretching, like a perfect free kick hanging in the air. Philipp risks a glance around the side of the bus. Grant’s back is to him, but even so he can see the change in his posture, the sudden tenseness of his spine.

“You’re shitting me,” says Grant, at last. He sounds reluctantly impressed. “What are you, the Danube or the Isar or—”

“Nothing so impressive,” says Thomas. “Just a man who loves his team very much. In any case I think we are done with this press conference, PC Grant? I am sorry about your Arsenal, I am sure they would have won if we had not scored two more goals than they did.”

Grant lets Thomas walk away without so much as another word before he, too, leaves, presumably to run extensive checks on everything that’s just come out of Thomas’s mouth. Philipp barely remembers to hurry back onto the bus before either of them can catch him eavesdropping.

The mood onboard is festive once again. It’s as if the encounter with PC Grant had never happened. Basti thumps his back as he makes his way to his seat, and Philipp offers him a distracted smile, feeling a faint twinge of guilt, the way he always does when he sees his vice-captain. It isn’t right, keeping all of this from him, but Basti is all heart and no guile, and Philipp can guess all too easily how badly he’d take what seems like half his teammates being wizards.

But Thomas—Thomas isn’t a wizard. Thomas is—

He doesn’t know. The closest he can come up with is “not a river spirit,” which doesn’t help at all. But it looks like he was wrong, impossibly wrong, about Thomas not being magical, and the idea of it simultaneously fascinates and terrifies him.

Then Thomas drops into the seat beside him and shouts “ _Super Bayern, super Bayern, hey, hey,”_ and as the rest of the team roars the chant back, Philipp feels it wash over him like a wave: sweat and beer and exuberance.

There’s nothing _vestigia_ -like about it. It’s something you’d find in every football stadium, in every cleared-away patch of ground serving time as a pitch, in every back-alley kickabout. So normal it becomes part of the background, always present but never remarked upon.

Philipp inhales, once, and it pulls him in like a riptide.

He thinks of standing on the pitch just before kickoff, the Südkurve rising like a tidal wave of red and white before him, fifty thousand voices buoying him up, lending strength to every step he takes. He thinks of fifty thousand hopes and fears seeping into the concrete and steel of Allianz Arena at home, carried along in banners and hymns away. He thinks of millions around the world clutching scarves, screaming themselves hoarse. Praying, as if that wild-eyed fervency could possibly be contained in so simple a word.

Miroslav told him once that there are—people, of a sort, whom government-approved licensed practitioners of magic like Ballack call _genii locorum_ : the spirits of rivers and forests and cities. Places that have existed long enough to attain personality, or sentience, or both.

And as the bus pulls out of the car park, Philipp thinks: maybe the same thing can happen to a team.

**\---**

They bring home the treble and it feels like vindication.

Philipp barely remembers the triumphal motorcade through Munich. It’s a blur of red and white, men and women and children screaming his name, screaming all of their names, and he sits back and drinks it in, still not entirely certain he’s awake.

In Marienplatz the gathered faithful raise their hands in the air and thunder out “Stern des Südens” and it’s a spell in its own right, chained together perfectly, the words falling into place like _formae_ rehearsed until they’re second nature. This, too, is magic, and it sends a sharp thrill down his spine no matter how many thousands of times he’s heard it before. He steps out onto the balcony of the Neues Rathaus and lifts the DFB trophy high, and Thomas cheers louder than anyone.

 _Thomas._ Some days Philipp still can’t believe it, and then he remembers Thomas holding an enchanted football in his hands in Bloemfontein and spiriting it away before anyone can notice it’s gone. Thomas, exhausted but unbowed after the Finale Dahoam. Thomas at Wembley, shouting _here are your Führungsspieler who aren’t Führungsspieler_ , full to bursting with defiance. Thomas, with his sarcasm and boundless energy and—yes, his self-assured arrogance, hiding in plain sight.

(“Did you know?” he demands of Miro over the phone, and Miro laughs, rare, warm, and fleeting.

“Of course I didn’t,” he says. “But he told me, the night before I left for Rome.”)

It isn’t the kind of conversation you have at practice in front of the whole team: _Hi, Mülli, so how long have you been a god?_ Instead Philipp invites him out for a round of golf and lets him talk nonstop, as he always does, until somewhere around the thirteenth hole, when Thomas finally notices that Philipp’s responses are even briefer than usual and glances up from the ball.

“Something up, Fips?” he says.

Philipp hesitates. He’s rehearsed this conversation countless times in front of a mirror, but even then he couldn’t find any way of saying it satisfactorily. It ought to be diplomatic, he thinks: German magic has never had anything as subtle and unspoken as England’s myriad arrangements, and somewhere in Weimar before the war there must have been a book detailing precisely what one ought to say when confronting a _genius loci_. A _genius pediludii_ , he corrects himself, and hopes he’s got the Latin right. Anyway, that book is long gone, and all his carefully chosen words about secrets and oaths sound needlessly self-important now.

Instead he says, “How long have you known I was a practitioner?”

Thomas, to his credit, barely bats an eyelid. With agonizing slowness, he lines up his shot and tips the ball neatly into the hole before replying.

“Oh, I was suspicious about you right off the bat,” he says, and the ever-present smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “But I figured Miro out first. You know how he always practices _lux_ the night before a big match? I thought I was going crazy the first time I walked past his hotel room and all I could smell was the ocean.”

“He didn’t know you knew?”

“Nope.” Thomas grins, and it’s the same easy, self-satisfied grin Philipp has known all these years, the same little huff that suggests he’s about to laugh at one of his own jokes. “Guess they hadn’t invented lying yet when Opa was born.”

Philipp shoots him a sidelong glance. “And what about when you were born?”

“Still 1989. Sorry to disappoint you.” Thomas waves the hand still holding the putter; Philipp ducks instinctively. “It’s not like we’re elves or whatever, and I don’t think it works the same as rivers. You don’t have to die to become one of us, that’s for sure. Can you imagine how much that’d suck for PR, a kid buying it on Säbener Straße?”

“So you wake up one morning,” says Philipp, “and you’re just—”

“Different.” Thomas shrugs. “Feels like suddenly there’s more of you but you aren’t attached to it, and it’s always changing. When I first joined the youth team I used to get sick whenever Bayern lost. My mother thought I was just taking the matches too seriously.”

Philipp thinks inexorably of the Finale Dahoam, of the text that followed. And what about now, he wants to ask. But the words stick in his throat and he swallows them back down again. It’s not as if he’d get a straight answer.

“You, though!” says Thomas, and wags an admonitory finger. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. I wasn’t totally sure about you until South Africa—or about Manu, for that matter. Speaking of which, I keep thinking I should tell him, but it’s always more fun to watch people figure it out.”

“We’ll have to keep an eye on him,” says Philipp. “He takes too many risks. One of these days he’ll try to pull another Bloemfontein and get himself in trouble with the KDA.”

“Not while I’m around,” says Thomas, and twirls his putter over one bony shoulder as he starts off toward the next hole. “Not while you’re around either, I’m guessing.”

Philipp frowns. “Who else knows?”

“Miro, obviously,” says Thomas. “And Kevin. And after a while it became impossible to keep the higher-ups at Bayern in the dark. But I’ve found the fewer people know, the better.”

“That makes sense.” Except for the part where it doesn’t, because— “Wait, Kevin? Kevin _Großkreutz?_ ”

“Well, yeah,” says Thomas, and grins. “I mean, I’d hope so, considering he’s Dortmund.”

Philipp stares at him, but Thomas doesn’t sound like he’s kidding.

Well, he decides after a moment, why not? Why should Bayern be allowed to have all the fun? It makes sense, in a convoluted kind of way, that any team can take on a life of its own if it’s been around long enough. Why shouldn’t there be a spirit of Dortmund? And then his line of thought runs further, past the German border: English teams should have _genii_ of their own, shouldn’t they? Was another one on the pitch in the Emirates, the day that policeman approached Thomas? Probably not—he didn’t look as if he’d recognized what Thomas was, until he’d been told.

Thomas is still watching him, looking for all the world like the cat who got the cream. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?” he says. “I’ve been thinking of asking for a raise.”

“Oh, shut up,” says Philipp, because Thomas’s head is big enough as it is. But it is pretty cool, if he lets himself think about it, if he shuts away the part of him that is already beginning to calculate what this could mean for Bayern, for the national team—

He’s about to tee off when another thought strikes him and he hesitates, glancing up.

“Is that why you’re so fucking good at Schafkopf?”

Thomas just laughs.


End file.
